


katabasis

by tothewillofthepeople



Series: i think i need a new heart [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, First Kiss, Fix-It, M/M, Mythology References, Nightmares, Pining, Post-Canon, References to Depression, Resurrection, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier is His Own Warning, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), rip to orpheus but richie’s different
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27666157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothewillofthepeople/pseuds/tothewillofthepeople
Summary: katabasis:a descent, such as a trip to the underworld.he keeps thinking about mythology. there’s a story itching at the back of his head, half-remembered. that greek singer bitch who went to the underworld to save his wife, but then fucked it up by turning around at the last moment.if only it were that easy. richie wouldn’t look back, if it was him. he knows it.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: i think i need a new heart [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2024594
Comments: 30
Kudos: 160





	katabasis

**Author's Note:**

> it’s a beautiful day in clown town and i am a horrible little fic writer.
> 
> this borrows lore from the book but probably not in a canon-compliant way because i have never read the book. just bear with me that this is a story about the power of belief.

“Rich,” says the voice on the phone, “we’re worried about you.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that, so for a long moment he doesn’t say anything.

He stays silent long enough that Bev sighs and asks, “Are you still there?”

“Yeah, Bevvy,” he says. “I’m here.”

“Come visit Ben and me. We’d love to have you—I mean it. You can stay in the spare room. This house has a sauna, even.”

Richie scrubs a hand through his hair and looks out the wide window of his apartment. “But Beverly,” he says, deepening his voice, “aren’t you worried about Ben finding out?”

“About what?”

“Our torrid love affair.”

She laughs at him, gently. “Beep beep, you absolute loon.” He hears a soft sort of rustle around her, like she’s shifting positions. “Please come visit. I want you to.”

“And break the hearts of the entire female population of Chicago? I could never be so cruel.” There’s a certain sort of joke that always comes easy to the tip of Richie’s tongue. He doesn’t think too hard about why that is. “I will. Soon. I promise. I just have things I need to do here first.”

“Tell me about them?”

 _I need to grovel to Steve some more so he stops punishing me,_ Richie thinks. _I need to finally fucking do the dishes I left in the sink before I left for Derry. I need to pay the bill on the counter. I need to see a therapist. I need to start taking my meds again. I need to stop staying in bed past noon every day. I need to take a shower. I don’t know the last time I took a shower._ “I just need to settle back into my skin,” he says out loud.

“Mm. I feel that. Trying to reconcile the old self with the new one.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, though he’s not sure that’s it. Bev’s life is better, after Derry. Richie’s life is… He doesn’t even know what he would call it. “Square peg in a round hole. And usually I’m so good at getting things in the right holes.”

“Jesus Christ,” she says, but she’s laughing. “You know, I would actually pay good money to see you try to pick up dates in a bar with lines like that.”

“You mock,” Richie says, “but there’s a particular brand of woman who is always interested in _fixing_ a guy like me.”

“I imagine a personality like yours is resistant to treatment.”

“It’s not fun if it’s not a challenge.”

“I miss you,” she says, and there’s still humor in her voice but the sincerity stops him cold. “How long will it be before you settle and I can steal you away?”

Richie hasn’t left his apartment in over a week. The last time he put on pants was to avoid flashing the pizza guy, and then he left those pants on for three days straight. “I’ll keep you updated,” he says. “I tend to stay busy.”

She hums a little. “Is that why you haven’t been calling anyone else back?”

He blusters for a moment, caught out. “That’s not—I’m not trying to—is this an _ambush?_ That wasn’t my fault. It was rats. Rats stole my phone.”

“Rats.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How did you get it back?”

“Oh, engaging them in a rap battle, of course.”

“I’m disappointed in you for not calling it a rat battle.”

“Fuck, you’re right,” Richie groans. “You should be my new ghostwriter.”

“I think you should be your own ghostwriter.”

“Isn’t that just writing?”

“Yup.”

“Gross.”

She laughs at him. “Bill seems to manage just fine.”

“Bill’s got a massive fucking brain, of course he _manages._ You think I’m on his level? I’m down here with the fucking rats.”

“Well then, get yourself out,” Bev says, like it’s just that easy.

He sighs. “Working on it, Miss Marsh.”

“You promise?” She always could see right through his bullshit. He loves that about her, even though it makes him itch and chafe.

“I promise.” 

For a moment they don’t say anything, just stay on the line, breathing.

“You know that Eddie would want you to be okay,” she says gently.

Richie grinds his teeth so hard he’s afraid they’ll break. 

He has no fucking idea what Eddie would want, actually, because he barely knew Eddie as an adult, he barely had any time to learn him. And Richie would have been rapt. He would have bent over backwards to know every miniscule detail about who Eddie Kaspbrak grew up to be.

Instead he got to watch Eddie die on top of him. 

“You know me, Bevvy,” he says into the phone. “I’m always okay.”

“I’m going to reiterate that Ben’s house has a sauna.”

“Well, you know I can never turn down an invitation to be half-naked and sweating my balls off.” One month. It’s been one month since Derry, and Richie doesn’t fucking feel better, and he can’t imagine a version of the future where he ever feels better. “Soon. I’ll come visit soon.”

“You’d better.”

Immediately after they hang up, Richie stubs his toe on the corner of his couch and accidentally sends his phone flying across the room, where it hits the wall and then the floor with an awful clatter. Swearing, he limps over to it.

The screen is completely shattered, badly enough that little shards of glass are coming off in his hands. He tries to turn it on and finds that half the screen has been overtaken by a glitchy gray mass.

“Aw, rats,” Richie says, heartfelt.

He actually has to leave his apartment then, to get a new phone, because he knows that if he stops answering texts from his friends they Will fly out to stage an intervention and he doesn’t want them seeing him like this.

Walking through Chicago is weird. He doesn’t like how close other people get to him on the sidewalk, and the process of getting a new phone involves so many fucking steps. The salesman at the Verizon store is nice about it, but he keeps trying to explain the benefits of upgrading to some new model, and Richie just wants something that can reliably make phone calls. “Whatever’s easiest, man,” he keeps saying, and the way the salesman grinds his teeth reminds him of Eddie.

He walks home with his head down. Orders a pizza for dinner and eats it on his balcony, in the warm evening air. And then just stays out there, staring at the moving gold of the city, frantic and bright and so totally unconnected to him.

He feels stuck in his chair. That’s been happening a lot. Like he doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to get up. Even when he’s hungry or tired.

Here’s what he can’t say to Beverly: his life has stopped making sense. He keeps finding himself in the middle of absurd scenarios—sitting in his bathtub in the dark, half-naked, eating cheerios—without really being able to explain why. 

But the worst part is the dreams. 

It starts like this: Richie is asleep. He rolls over and realizes someone is in the bed with him. It’s Eddie, of course. Laying on his side, facing Richie, and when their eyes meet he smiles. But there’s something dark about the smile. Something slick and spreading. Richie, frozen in place, will realize that blood is pooling around Eddie’s body—blood from the stab wound high on his cheek, blood from within the cavern of his mouth, blood relentless and wet from his ripped-open torso. But Eddie keeps smiling, and looking at Richie like he’s waiting for something. 

Richie can’t move. The sheets and blankets become drenched in red. He wants to lurch forward, press his hands to Eddie’s body to staunch the bleeding. Or he wants to flinch away and avoid the dark spread. He can’t do either. He has to wait for the darkness, warm and awful, to reach him.

He usually wakes up screaming. His sleep schedule is shot to hell, and he’s seen more late-night television than he ever cared to.

In the blurry midnight hour, sometimes he wonders about the look on dream-Eddie’s face. What he could possibly be waiting for. Is there something Richie is supposed to be doing, some new trick or fuckery that can erase the ending, write a better one?

He leans forward and props his arms on the railing of the balcony. He doesn’t want to go to bed—doesn’t want to tempt the nightmares down again.

Sometimes he sees Stan instead, bleeding from the wrists. That’s almost as bad.

He doesn’t go to sleep until the sun peeks over the edges of the city.

The next day, his agent calls.

“I just don’t understand where you’ve gone, man,” Steve says, in that rapid-fire way of talking that he has. “You keep saying you’re back in Chicago but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you. What the fuck?”

“I’m taking some personal time,” Richie grouses.

“And I’m all for it, really, I am. But _your_ personal time is biting _me_ in the ass. No one likes being cancelled on, Rich. The longer you stay away the harder it’s gonna be for me to get you back onstage.”

“I know.”

“You don’t sound like you care.”

He doesn’t. It’s an almost pleasant realization. “Listen, I’m going through some family shit. I can’t get up and crack jokes right now. Tell everyone to take a rain check.”

“Fine. But snap out of it, all right? I’m not gonna let you stay a washed-up has-been.”

“Jesus. Go pick your mom’s pubes out of your teeth and quit bothering me.”

“Real nice, asshole.”

Richie hangs up without saying goodbye and spends the rest of the afternoon half-napping on the couch while some British baking show plays on the television. There’s something soothing about the accents and the nicely decorated cakes. He feels unduly stressed whenever someone’s sponge cake isn’t moist enough, but mostly it’s nice. He wishes he was a sponge cake and not a human being. That would be cool.

Maybe someday he’ll try to do some baking. He was never stellar at it, even though he’s a pretty good cook when he has the energy. Cooking just takes heart. Baking takes precision, which he never had enough of. Eddie would make a better baker than him.

He turns off the show and lays facedown for a while.

Mostly he tries not to think about it. Sometimes it creeps up on him. He’s all emotion and he has nowhere to put it—the thought of telling his friends precisely how fucked up he is doesn’t sound great. None of them would quite get it. Richie barely gets it himself.

Because it’s new. The depth of feeling. Oh, the roots are ancient, stretching back to messy hot summers when they were both too young to know anything.

But at the same time it’s new. Richie is an adult man, and only one month ago he was back in Derry, loving Eddie, and wondering if it was real.

He hates himself for having wondered. The feeling was too sudden, too all-encompassing. He didn’t trust it. Derry magic had wiped half of his memories, for fuck’s sake; the blossom of affection in his chest every time he looked at Eddie was marked suspicious, filed away. He figured he could sort it out once the fighting was all over. There were more pressing matters on his mind.

Now it’s over. Now he knows.

No magic fuckery. Just Richie, drenched in affection for the boy he forgot.

Not that it ever would have mattered. Eddie was married. To a woman, which was funnier than any joke Richie’s ever made in his career. He’s never talked to Myra directly—he can’t call her Mrs. Kaspbrak, even in his head, it makes him want to scream—but he knows that Bev and Bill both did, trying to explain to her gently that her husband had died and wasn’t coming home.

She hadn’t taken it very well. She had, in fact, threatened them all with several lawsuits, and then accused Beverly of having an affair with him, and then tried to get Bill arrested.

Richie was inclined to dislike her anyway, but it was nice to have a concrete reason.

Mike, he thinks, was in charge of reaching out to Stan’s wife. Patty. Richie keeps thinking that he should try to get in touch with her too—but he can’t yet, the same way he can’t do most things. His body just won’t let him.

Time passes. He doesn’t have much to say about it. He keeps dreaming about Eddie’s expectant face, smeared with gore, and wakes up sobbing.

Something has to change.

The city is hot and vibrant with summer. Richie’s apartment, with its huge east-facing window, gets almost unbearably warm during the day. He spends a lot of time sitting on his little balcony, taking in the light and trying to catch the breeze off the lake.

It’s on one of these idyll afternoons that Mike calls. Richie’s new phone has an obnoxious ringer that he hasn’t bothered trying to change, and it startles him badly enough that he almost pitches the damn thing into the street. He answers the phone swearing.

“Wow,” is the first thing Mike says. “At least act happy to hear from me.”

“Mike, you’re the light of my life and the fire of my loins,” Richie says. “But I almost just tossed my phone off a fourth-story balcony, so you’re gonna have to give me a sec for my heart rate to settle.”

Mike laughs. “Fair enough. Take all the time you need.”

Richie settles back in his chair, holding the phone tight. “Where are you these days?”

“Oh man,” Mike says. He sounds so damn excited, and it brings a smile to Richie’s face. He is genuinely happy that his friends are happy. “I’m in the southwest, I wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

“Ah yes, the vagina of our great nation. How was it?”

“It was beautiful, and you calling it America’s vagina can’t even ruin it for me.”

“Impressive.” Richie leans back in his deck chair and hikes his legs up onto the railing. “I’ve never been. Seen photos, though.”

“It’s like the whole landscape is scraped bare,” Mike says. “You can see the layers of rock that have been worn down over thousands and thousands of years—it’s pretty fucking sobering, man. How small it makes me feel.”

“Wow. That is saying something.” Richie gets it, though. It’s how he feels about skyscrapers. He likes that there are things in the world bigger than him.

“What about you, what have you been up to?”

Richie hums, trying to think of a casual way to bring the subject around to the topic on his mind. Subtlety has never been his strong suit, but he feels like he can’t just blurt out how much he wonders about resurrecting their dead childhood friend. “Not a whole lot. Just vibing. Processing.”

“Yeah? How’s that going?”

He shuts his eyes tight. He’s just gonna have to do it. “You’re just the man I’ve been wanting to talk to about it, actually. I was wondering. Do you, like, know any rituals for…bringing someone back?”

There’s a long pause. “Like, from the dead?” Mike asks slowly.

“Um. Yeah.”

An even longer pause. Richie scratches the back of his neck and hates himself. This was such a stupid idea.

“None that I know of,” Mike finally says. “That’s one of those…You know. Unbreakable laws of magic. Death and love. Those are the ones that can’t really be fucked with.”

“Yeah. Right. Okay.” How cruel, for the illogical to have that sort of logic. “No worries. Just wondering.”

Mike’s voice is very, very careful, like he’s approaching a wild animal. “You doing all right, Rich?”

God. He’s so fucking sick of that question. “Just fucking peachy. Like that gay Italian movie, did you see it?”

A short, mystified pause. “I don’t think I did.”

“You shouldn’t. The editing is whack. But yeah.” He clears his throat. “Heard from Bill lately?”

He’s relieved to hear that the careful sympathy in Mike’s voice is gone when he starts talking again. “Oh, yeah. He’s been sending me book ideas basically every time he has them. Writers. I’ll never understand.”

“Hey, I write sometimes.”

A small laugh. “I’m not enough of a writer to be able to accurately describe the gulf between what you do and what Bill does.”

“Ouch, man,” Richie says. “Admit it. I could do horror but Bill could never do stand-up.”

“Listen,” Mike says, “you talk about your sex life enough in your stand-up that it counts as horror to _me—”_

“Be nice to me!” Richie yelps. “I didn’t write most of that stuff anyway, I take none of the blame.”

“But all of the credit, apparently. I don’t think you get to call yourself a writer if someone else does it for you.”

Richie doesn’t mention the grubby notebooks around the apartment, half of them with the pages all but completely torn out, that he’s been scribbling in. So far he has nothing that he wants to keep. “So Bev keeps saying. Are you all in cahoots?”

“Of course. She wants you to go visit her, by the way.”

“Yeah, I know.”

They’re quiet for a moment. “I might swing up your way soon,” Mike says, faux-casual. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Field Museum.”

“Oh, it’s rad, they have the man-eating lions,” Richie says, before he can stop himself. Then he clears his throat. “But don’t make your road trip plans around me, dude. I’m like…super busy?”

“Oh yeah?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well that’s good to hear.”

“Yeah, it’s great.”

“Good to keep yourself occupied.”

“I agree.”

“I might drive up that way anyway.”

Richie sighs. When did he become such a bad liar? “Seriously, dude, don’t let me interrupt the Great American Road Trip. You’ll just make me feel bad.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want that.”

They end the call not long after that. Richie takes a shower for the first time in ages and spend half of it just standing with his face directly in the spray, pondering.

Asking Mike was a bust. And Mike is the one who researches all of this shit, so he’s in a position to know. The fact that he doesn’t have answers probably means that there are no answers to be found.

But Richie can’t stop thinking about it. Popular thought says no one can come back from the dead. The undiscovered country or whatever the fuck. No loopholes to find, no bargains to be made. The final stage of grief is acceptance.

Richie doesn’t buy that. He’s seen things that shouldn’t have existed. Reality is so much wilder and scarier and fucked up than people know, and the rules of the world don’t always apply when it comes to their little murder hometown.

There has to be a way.

He keeps thinking about mythology. There’s a story itching at the back of his head, half-remembered. That Greek singer bitch who went to the underworld to save his wife, but then fucked it up at the last moment.

If only it were that easy. Richie wouldn’t look back, if it was him. He knows it.

He sings in the shower for the first time since he was a teenager. It doesn’t help much, but it eases some of the pressure in his chest.

One month tips over into another. Richie goes out to an actual restaurant for dinner for the first time, and it’s totally fine. No one looks at him. The waiter is polite. None of the food starts hatching monsters. He leaves a huge tip on his way out and counts the night a success.

God, he’s pathetic. 

But it helps. The little steps. He visits an actual grocery story a week later and gets some food that won’t require a delivery driver. Easy stuff. Pasta. Frozen meals. He hesitates too long over the vegetables, knowing in his brain that he needs them, but knowing in his heart that they’ll likely rot before he puts them to use. He leaves the store with a single tomato, feeling cautiously optimistic.

He’s cooking a few nights later when Bill calls. Richie puts him on speaker.

“What’s that noise?”

“Oh, I’m sautéing onions,” Richie says, making sure to be extra loud. 

Bill makes an impressed sound. “You can cook?”

“Don’t sound so shocked, you’ll hurt my feelings.”

“I would have guessed you were an instant ramen kinda guy.”

Richie eyes the 24-pack of ramen currently perched on his counter for easy access. “Yeah, well, fuck you. I’m making stir-fry.”

“That’s great.” Bill’s voice is a little too hearty, and Richie sighs. He hates being able to tell that his friends are talking about him behind his back. Hopefully Bill can give them all a good enough report so that they’ll stop worrying.

He’s a month behind on rent. He’s very pointedly not thinking about it. “How’s LA?”

“Hot. Fine. Audra’s doing well.” Richie hums. He doesn’t know much about Bill’s wife, but he can’t imagine it was easy to have her husband disappear for a week with no warning. Apparently she had taken it remarkably well—enough that Bill had texted the Losers, once or twice, asking if he should tell her the whole story. “How’s Chicago?”

“Same as always. I keep having little old ladies offer me their seats on the bus so I don’t have to stand with the weight of my massive schlong.” Bill becomes almost incoherent with laughter. Richie grins down at his pan of sizzling onions. “Seriously. I just about throw my back out every time I stand up.”

“Stop, stop, I can’t take it—”

“That’s funny, that’s exactly what your mom—”

“Richie, I _swear to god!”_

He adds the chicken to the pan and lets it cook undisturbed for a minute. “It’s good to hear your voice, man.”

“Yours too. Mike was saying something about heading your way for a visit.”

Richie shuts his eyes. “Oh, he mentioned it, but I don’t know if the timing is great.”

“Huh. He seemed pretty set on it.”

Damn it. Richie is gonna have to deal with that. He pokes sullenly at the chicken. “Been talking to him a lot?”

“A fair amount. Mostly about the new project, he’s been a big help on that.”

Richie blinks over at his phone. “Oh, are you writing partners now?” Why does that sting a little? It shouldn’t. But it does.

Bill laughs a little, fondly. “A little bit, I guess. He’s been doing a lot of research into different traditions and folklores. He thinks there are probably other towns like Derry—”

“What, that deserve to get wiped off the map?”

“Okay, not exactly like Derry, but towns that have something a little bit other about them. Like, with other gods.”

“Is he trying to become a monster killer? Should we be saving up to buy him a Scooby-Doo van?”

Bill huffs at him. “He doesn’t want to kill monsters. I doubt there’s much else out there as bad as what we saw.”

“I wish I had your level of belief. One fucked-up elder god was enough for me. I don’t want to think about any others.”

“I mean, Pennywise wasn’t even the only god in Derry.”

Richie frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I told you about the turtle, didn’t I?”

A memory slams back into him like a wave off the ocean. It’s all sensation, no detail. A scary story told after dark. How is he still finding pieces of Derry buried in himself after all this time? Richie tries to keep his voice level. “You might have, but I forgot.”

“He told me how to fight Pennywise the first time,” Bill says. “Big thing called Maturin. Pennywise told me he was dead, but I’m pretty sure It was lying. Anyway, Mike was reading about this town in Florida—”

Richie tunes him out. The more he thinks about it, the more he can remember the vague details of what Bill told him, all those years ago. A giant, benevolent force, committed to helping the Losers defeat It. A huge cosmic turtle, on the side of good. An all-powerful being.

“—Richie, are you even listening to me?”

“What? Oh, yeah, go on. You were just at the part where she offered you a threesome?”

It startles a laugh out of Bill. “You’re a dick. Hey, I need to run, but keep in touch, okay? I miss you, man.”

“Aw,” Richie says. “If you wanted nudes all you had to do was ask.”

“Hey Richie? Do not plant that image in my mind ever again.”

Richie makes an obnoxious kissing sound into the phone. “Catch you later, Big Bill.”

“Bye, Rich.”

He hangs up and stares at the wall opposite him for a long, long time.

Ancient turtle god?

That sounds exactly like what Richie needs.

“Slow down, Trashmouth,” he mutters. What is he going to do, fly back to Derry? Try to get the attention of the turtle god and demand Eddie’s life back?

And then he hates himself, because the idea is so compelling that he can feel it eating his brain. He almost burns his damn stir-fry, and then he eats it without tasting a thing, too lost in thought.

It would be madness. He doesn’t want to go back. There’s no reason to. It wouldn’t work.

Right?

He takes a pack of cigarettes out to his balcony in the early evening and then doesn’t smoke a single one, even though he wants to. It’s Eddie’s voice in his head, warning him of the dangers of cancer, listing carcinogens and side effects. Every time he slides one out of the box, he ends up snapping it in half and dropping it over the edge of the balcony instead of bringing it to his lips.

It wasn’t even his box. They were Bev’s emergency cigarettes, pressed into his hand on their last day in Derry. She had kissed his cheek before departing with Ben into her happily ever after.

When he sleeps, he has the dream again. Eddie drenched in blood, smiling sweetly at Richie from the other side of the bed.

He wakes up. Books a flight to Bangor, layover in Portland. Car rental to take him the rest of the way to Derry.

He has nothing to lose, right? This—what he’s been doing for the last three months—is barely living. 

It’s been three months since Eddie died, almost to the day. Richie packs a bag and locks up his apartment. He doesn’t tell anyone that he’s going, just answers texts like usual and makes up lies about catching a stomach bug.

Steve is irate that he’s still unavailable. The Losers are sympathetic. Richie wants to feel bad about lying to all of them, but he feels almost nothing.

He spends the first plane ride brainstorming ways to get the turtle’s attention. All he can think of doing is taking a fuckton of drugs, and he isn’t sure where in Derry he would be able to procure them. He spends most of the second flight, short as it is, fast asleep. A flight attendant has to shake him awake when they land in Bangor.

“Thanks,” he says groggily. He buys a shitty coffee in the airport in an attempt to wake up, and then spends a fruitless half-hour trying to figure out where exactly the rental cars are. It’s early afternoon by the time he’s on the road to Derry, weaving through the bright green countryside.

He made this trip a fair amount as a kid with his parents. Bangor was exciting because it was big—for a good portion of his life, it was what he imagined a city to be. Now it feels quaint and small to Richie, with the grime of Chicago still on the soles of his shoes.

It’s nice to be on the road with barely any other cars. He hates driving—one of the reasons he lives in a place with semi-reliable public transport—but it’s not so bad when he can let one eye wander to the fields and trees around him. He even has to brake for a deer at one point.

Late summer in Maine. It feels like nothing has changed, except everything has, because Richie has changed. He’s older now, and taller, and he carries lead in his stomach at all hours of the day.

Ben calls him just as he crosses the city limit. Richie debates not picking up, but it would make him feel too cruel. He tucks the phone against his ear. “Hey, Haystack, what’s shaking?”

“Richie! Hey man, I’ve missed you.”

He can’t help the grin that spreads across his face. God, he loves his mushy fucking friends. “Stop, you’re making me blush.”

“I just wanted to check in, I feel like we haven’t talked in ages. What are you up to?”

“Oh, you know,” Richie says. “Running up that hill. Making a deal with god. The usual.”

“What?”

He sighs. Bev would have gotten the reference. “Not much. You?”

“Not a whole ton. I was actually redoing my whole deck before everything, uh, happened. And I’ve just started getting back to that. I want to finish it by the end of the summer.”

Richie whistles. “That’s pretty cool. I bet Bev likes the eye candy. She doing all right at yours?”

“I think so.” The warm pleasure in Ben’s voice is impossible to miss. “I certainly like having her here.” His voice turns more business-like. “She told me that she invited you out for a visit. And I wanted you to know that you’re always welcome here.”

Jesus. He loves his friends, but their repeated attempts to see him makes him want to cry. “Thanks, man,” he says. “I mean it. I’ll take you up on that offer soon. Oh man, you’re gonna regret it. I’m gonna steal all your bathrobes and sleep in until noon every day.”

Ben laughs. “That’s fine with me.”

“Soon,” Richie says. “I just have a few things I need to take care of first.” He’s almost to main street, and he’s finding it a lot harder to drive and talk at the same time. Derry is pulling his focus. “Hey, Ben, I gotta go. We’ll talk soon, okay?”

“Wait, Richie—”

Richie hangs up. He doesn’t know how much longer he can keep his location secret, and he doesn’t want the other Losers coming after him. He doesn’t want to be the thing that drags them back to Derry, so soon after they all got out.

He doesn’t want them to try and stop him. Logic, facts—those can’t help him now. 

There are so many fucking reasons for this not to work, prime among them being the fact that Bill’s turtle god has absolutely no incentive to abide by the rules of half-remembered Greek myth. But Richie doesn’t care. From the start, this has been about belief.

Richie Tozier believes in bargains and he believes in gods, and he will dig a tunnel to the center of the fucking planet if that’s what it takes to find one.

Huh. Honestly, that’s a more straightforward idea than anything else he currently has in mind. He makes a stop in a hardware store on his way through town.

The lot where the Neibolt house once stood is just a patch of dirt, now. Nothing marking it as the site of the most horrific episodes of Richie’s life. Nothing commemorating the man buried deep beneath the surface. There are a few wildflowers growing there now. They’re pretty, in a small way that makes Richie feels strangely desperate. 

He walks to the very center of the lot with his brand-new shovel and regards the land for a long moment.

This is the stupidest idea he’s ever had.

He starts to dig.

While he digs, he remembers.

A hundred days of high school with Richie waiting for the bell so he could find his friends in the hallway. A hundred nights in college, where he laid back in his too-small twin-sized bed and wondered why it felt like some vital part of his heart was missing. Coming home to Derry and realizing that his adulthood had been a fragment, one piece of a seven-pointed star that should never have been pulled apart. Bill’s band of merry rebels, each one full of hot blood and determination. He remembers how right it felt, to have them all together. How much it hurt, to realize that Stan wasn’t coming back. To realize that Eddie wouldn’t make it out.

He gets dirt in his eyes more than once when he stops to wipe tears away.

He remembers Eddie the teenager, in turns feral and sweet. Eddie the adult, nodding under Richie’s hand, his face taped up and his mouth curved down. 

His hands soon sprout blisters, bloody and stinging. He doesn’t care much. 

He keeps digging through the late afternoon, stopping only to drain water from the bottle he brought with him. Once it’s empty, he doesn’t have a reason to stop. He just digs.

It hurts like hell. All of it.

Sometime around sunset he takes a moment to rests his arms and look around at his handiwork. Pretty quickly, he makes a terrible observation.

It’s not a pit or a tunnel that he’s making. It’s shaped like a grave.

The thought scares him so badly that he flings down his shovel and clambers out, clawing at the dirt and cursing until he can stand in the early twilight. His whole body is shuddering with horror. Richie doesn’t want to die; he just wants Eddie to live. As he takes huge gulps of air, he starts to wonder if this is worth it after all. The moon is a sliver and offers no guidance. The sky is light lavender. It’s a beautiful evening, and Richie feels like an insane person alone in an empty lot, because that’s what he is.

There’s probably nothing to be found. He could dig for another 27 years and probably never come upon the crush of rock where they left Eddie’s body. But what is the other option, giving up? Going home? He _can’t._

His breathing slows. He’s so tired. He just wants to sleep. Something is dragging his eyelids down, down, down—and then Richie’s body folds like a house of cards and he falls into the grave.

He doesn’t see anything but black.

And black.

And black.

And black.

And…salt.

In his mouth. 

The taste of salt.

Richie opens his eyes and almost immediately has a heart attack.

He’s…underwater.

Underwater, underground, floating in a huge stone cavern that glows with an otherworldly blue light. There are schools of fish and everything, darting around like they have somewhere to be.

Richie tries to hold his breath, but he wasn’t fucking prepared for this, and within moments he’s taking water in, in, into his lungs.

But it doesn’t seem to matter.

He’s not choking or suffocating. The functions of his body keep cheerfully whirring on, like nothing is wrong. 

It feels so strange, to have water in his mouth without drowning. That’s about when it occurs to him that he is Probably Not In Kansas Anymore. This is not his reality.

Which, considering what he’s attempting, is potentially a good sign.

He looks around, trying to figure out if there’s a spot he should swim to. Then he looks down, and that’s when he sees the turtle.

“Oh, holy fuck,” Richie says, because he just can’t help it.

Nothing could have prepared him for how large the thing is. It takes up the entire belly of the cavern, big enough that each square of its shell is the size of a small room. Most of its limbs are pulled in and out of sight, but the old massive head is out and tilted up towards Richie. It watches him with huge, black eyes.

Maturin.

Richie says the first thing that comes to mind: “I heard you were dead.”

A rumble of noise precedes the speaking. “And yet you came all this way?” The voice doesn’t come from the turtle’s mouth. It reverberates through the water from every fucking direction. It makes Richie’s head ache.

He tries to act unfazed. “What can I say, man, I’m desperate.”

“You are.” Ouch. Whatever. “I could hear you digging. No one has ever tried to find me that way before. I was curious.”

“Is that why you brought me down? To satisfy your curiosity?”

The turtle shifts, and Richie finds himself swaying in the resulting movement of the water. “Was it curiosity that made you seek out a being you thought had perished?”

“No,” Richie says. “More like hope. Glad to see you’re alive and kicking.”

“I am not so easy to kill. Not like a human.”

There’s his opening. “That’s why I’m here, actually. I need your help. Someone died who wasn’t supposed to.”

Somehow the turtle sounds unimpressed. “Do you think anyone is _supposed_ to die, Richard Tozier?”

“I mean, yeah, eventually.” It’s hard to make his usual expressive gestures with the water dragging at his limbs. “But not the way this guy went out. He was being so fucking brave—he was saving me. He shouldn’t have died for it.”

“You are speaking of Edward Kaspbrak.”

Richie takes a moment to calm his heart. “I am. You know him?”

“I know the souls who die in Derry.”

“There are a lot of them. I know. But, um, this one’s special. To me. That’s why I’m here. For him.”

A groan of exasperation. “What is it that you want?”

Richie hesitates. In a desperate flash he wishes he were more eloquent, and that all his public speaking training hadn’t been about how to get a laugh. “I want you to give him back to me.”

A rumble from everywhere in the cavern. “Turn back the dead, simply because you ask?”

“There are myths where it happens,” Richie argues. “I made it here, didn’t I? That proves I have, like, mettle. Determination. Chutzpah. So you should be willing to hear me out.”

The turtle blinks slowly while it muses this over. “Who told you I would make such a deal?”

“No one told me,” Richie admits. He still isn’t used to talking past the water in his mouth; it feels like he’s choking when he tries to speak. “I had to try anyway.”

“What will you give me, then, for the life of your friend?”

Oh. He maybe should have prepared an answer, but honestly he didn’t expect to get this far. “What do you want?”

The turtle’s head swings away from him. “There is nothing that I want. Nothing you could provide. This is not a bargain dependent on value, Richard Tozier.”

Good thing, too. Richie can’t think of a single thing he would consider as valuable as Eddie’s life. Not even his own.

Think. _Think._ What can he offer? His youth, his memories? He has no totems in his pockets, and he also isn’t well-versed on the dietary habits of cosmic reptiles. How does the story go? Is it a song that gets traded for a second chance?

Richie can’t fucking sing. He knows he can’t, and it would be folly to try now, with saltwater so cloying on his tongue. No, he can’t sing.

But he can make people laugh.

“I tell jokes,” he says loudly. “I use Voices. It’s what I’m known for. They call me Trashmouth, because I never stop talking. I’m…funny. I’m a funny guy. I could tell you jokes.”

The turtle thinks it over. “Laughter for the life of your friend?” Richie nods, heart in his throat, and waits. The water is warm and his eyes are stinging. He wonders how long he’s been here—time feels blurry and unreal. Maybe he’s been waiting for an answer for five seconds. Maybe it’s been five months. “Very well,” says the turtle. “You can try.”

Oh, _fuck._

He didn’t really think Maturin would agree. And he knows in a flash that his old shit won’t work. The crap he’s been peddling onstage for years and years—ghost-written, soulless, unerringly heterosexual—that’s not going to cut it for the toughest crowd he’s ever fucking faced.

So Richie writes his own material.

“This has gotta be the weirdest fucking venue I’ve ever performed in,” he says, because it needs saying. “And I’m performed in some weird places. I don’t know how much omniscience being a universe-turtle gives you, but there are some seedy bars in this world. Feels like I should be getting hazard pay half the time. You think an establishment is rough because the bartender keeps a bat close by? Try places where they have a Glock. It’s great for the adrenaline, though. I’m never funnier than when I think someone’s going to shoot me if I’m not entertaining enough.” Having Eddie’s life hinging on his ability to make the turtle laugh probably tops that story, admittedly, but Richie doesn’t want to be _too_ self-referential. He’s seen it kill too many great comics. 

“I’ve got a pretty cool head under pressure, which helps when you live in a city like Chicago. Because cities are so goddamn weird. You have to be prepared for anything. Every time you walk down the sidewalk, you take your sanity into your hands. You could be seconds away from the most bizarre encounter of your life and you have to stay on your toes. Except not really, because sometimes there are foot fetishists on the trains, and you don’t want to give those guys a fucking inch or else you’ll wake up with someone tonguing in between your toes.”

Is the turtle against kinkshaming? Does he need to worry about that? Too late now.

“But anyway. The city can’t scare me. I grew up in Derry. People tell me they’re scared to take the subway at night, and I’m like, what a walk in the park. I had to deal with the scariest shit in the world growing up. That’s right, I’m talking about asking girls to prom.”

The turtle is watching him with unnerving attention. Richie hopes that he’s not misreading the amusement on its big reptilian face, but seriously, how the fuck is he supposed to know?

“See, we had a pact, Eddie and I. We were each gonna find a girl and then we were gonna go to prom together, as friends, so no one would feel pressured or awkward. And did we think of asking Beverly? Of course we did. Literally both of us. But—” (and here he takes a moment to sigh tragically, which is still weird, considering all the water in his lungs) “—Bill had already asked her. Depressingly perfect. Eddie and I had to man up and ask other girls.”

He runs his hand back through his hair and finds the curls all soft and floaty. It almost throws him for a moment, but he powers on. “And here’s the thing: I did not want to ask a single one of them. I gave it a lot of thought, too! I made a list! I did pros and cons! But none of them felt right, which should have taught me a lot more about myself than it did. But anyway. I couldn’t bear to tell Eddie that I hadn’t asked anyone. So I just kept telling him, ‘I asked so-and-so, but she turned me down.’ Over and over. And here’s the thing: he kept telling me the same. To this day I have no idea if he was actually getting rejected or if he was too chickenshit to actually do it.”

He tells the story as he remembers it, with Eddie sketched out in sharp detail and the whole rest of the school in the hazy background. The Losers had all gone to prom together, actually. But Richie and Eddie had been a pair in their preparations. 

He rubs his hands together. “So it gets to the week before prom. Things are looking dire. Neither of us have dates, and we’re both still pretending that we want girls to date us. Or at least I was. And then Eddie—and let me just take a moment to say that Eddie is the bravest, craziest motherfucker I have ever met, which is only part of the reason I love him—but anyway, Eddie says, ‘this is dumb, Rich, just go to the dance with me.’ And I about shit myself. Dream come true, right? And so I go, ‘Really, Eddie? You want that?’ And this little bitch looks me dead in the eyes and says, ‘Of course not. You’re gonna look like a chimp in a suit and try to spike the punch. But I’d rather go and look dumb with you than go and look dumb by myself.’” 

Richie takes a moment to stop and laugh at his own memory. “Absolutely stone cold. He could read me like nobody else, which is probably why I like it when men are a little mean to me. Not that I knew why until recently!”

He clears his throat, and then has to deal again with the weirdness of the otherworldly underwater. “Now, of course, I’m an adult. I’ve been to therapy. I have blown dudes in bathroom stalls. I know that _I_ was the chickenshit one, for not telling Eddie that I just wanted to go with him. But I didn’t know that was possible at the time. I didn’t believe in it. It wasn’t even an articulate thought in my head, just a massive ache that I carried around every day. And I think we all had something like that. I honestly do.” 

The best stand-up, in Richie’s opinion, is a little bit raw and a little bit honest, somewhere at its core. He’s never been able to pull it off. It pours out of him now. 

“We were kids, and we had to deal with having seen unspeakable horrors, by which I mean Eddie’s mom in the morning before she had her makeup on. Anyway. It wasn’t really an environment for emotional openness. I didn’t learn that until after I left, and I probably still haven’t fully learned it, given that I usually start talking about my dick whenever one of my friends tries to say they miss me. I’m mad I lost my memories, you know? But sometimes I’m grateful that I got to become a person without the weight of all of that on top of me all the time. I think it was healthy for us all to leave and become actual adults. We had to get out and grow up.” Inspiration strikes. “We all had some _Maturin_ to do.”

There’s a sound like a wave crashing into a sea cave. It takes a moment for Richie to realize that the sound is the turtle _laughing._

Oh, fuck, he did it. “We did!” he shouts. “We had to grow up and realize that it’s a choice, it’s always a choice, who you’re going to be and what you’re going to believe. I chose to believe in deep dish pizza and gay porn for _so many years,_ and now I believe that if I bitch hard enough, the universe will give me what I want!” The sound is still roaring around him, so loud he can barely hear his own voice. “My name is Richie Tozier!” he yells, like he’s leaving the stage at fucking Madison Square Gardens. “I hope you have a goddamn good night!”

It takes a while for the water and the noise to settle. Richie waits with his heart in his throat the entire time. Jesus, he’ll never be afraid of an SNL appearance again. Was it enough? Has he really managed to save Eddie’s skin with nothing more than his memories and puns? His entire body feels drained and exhausted, like he’s been talking for hours. Just when he thinks he’s about to lose his mind, the turtle opens its eyes and Richie is caught in their intensity once more.

“All right, Richard Tozier,” says the voice. Is he imagining the edge of amusement in it now? “You have gotten me to laugh. I will uphold my end of the bargain.” Before Richie can even begin to feel relieved, the turtle adds, “But I am playing by your rules. You will have to find your way to the surface with Edward Kaspbrak walking behind. You cannot turn around. You cannot look back. If you do, our deal is forfeit, and his life is mine.”

He should have fucking expected a loophole. “Classical rules, huh?”

“You wrote the playbook for this encounter.”

“I guess I did.” Richie can’t wait to have a panic attack about this later. But he’s come this far: he might as well push his luck. “I don’t suppose you can toss Stan into the deal as well, can you?”

“He did not die in Derry,” the turtle says. “He is beyond my reach.”

Richie’s gonna need some time to cry about that one. But not now. He tries to take a deep breath, chokes on water, and then composes himself as best he can. “All right. I won’t look back. I promise.”

“Good.” The water around Richie begins to swirl. “Then I think you had best get going.”

Jesus, this is moving so fast. “I don’t, uh,” he stammers out, “I don’t get to see him first? So I know this is legit?”

Maturin fixes him with one great eye. “No,” the voice intones. “You must trust that he will follow.”

Because in the end, all this shit had always come down to belief.

“Right,” Richie says. “Okay. Cool. Um, thank you?”

“Remember,” says the voice, as the water around Richie swirls faster. “Don’t look back.”

Richie doesn’t have time to respond. A rush of salt and sea foam knocks him over, drags him down and down. He keeps a desperate hand on his glasses, crushing them to his face, so he won’t lose them. The movement is dizzying. He feels sick—he’s going to be sick—

All at once, the motion stops. Richie sits up, gasping, and finds himself sitting in a black tunnel. Surrounded by greywater. Soaked from his toes to the end of his curly hair. He finally understands what the turtle meant, about finding his way out.

He’s in the sewers. He has to get out without looking back.

He swallows. “Eddie, I really fucking hope you’re with me,” he breathes out, and starts to move.

The tunnel is grim and dark as hell. No light at the end to move towards, no signs on the walls. Richie’s chest is tight with panic and he wants to run, he wants to bolt out of there quick as he can, but he’s so scared of slipping. If he falls, if he rolls, if his face turns back for even a moment… So he goes slow. Picks his way carefully through the stench and slime.

He comes to a fork and has no idea which one to choose. He almost glances over his shoulder to ask Eddie’s opinion, and then shudders, furious with himself. “Figure it out, Richie,” he mutters, and goes right. The tunnel stretches forward into the dark.

He’s so, so alone. The only sounds are his own feet in the water. Surely, if Eddie were behind him, he would be able to hear him too? He grits his teeth. Either way, he needs to keep moving. 

It isn’t long before he realizes: he’s never had to do this by himself. He always had Bill’s steely determination to lead the way, he’s always had Mike’s obsessive lore, he’s always had _Eddie_ before, Eddie with his big eyes and his bravery and his unflappable sense of direction.

Richie alone can’t find the path out. He doesn’t know the way.

“I don’t know the way, Eds,” he says out loud, and he doesn’t know when he started crying but it’s hot on his face. “I don’t know how to do this.”

He misses them all so much it feels like a hole in his heart. Ben’s kindness, Bev’s boldness, and Stan—fuck, Stan, the most terrified of them all, who still showed up at thirteen to fucking fight for all of them. Stan, who had to die alone. What would he say, if he were wading into the dark at Richie’s side? _You got us into this shit, Trashmouth, now get us out._ No ambiguity. No other option.

He keeps moving forward. “You’d better be here, Eddie. If I make it out and you’re not behind me, there’s going to be hell to pay.” No response, obviously. That would make it too easy. Richie wouldn’t be afraid for a moment if he had the tether of Eddie’s voice.

But there’s nothing. Just his own breathing and the gentle sound of the water.

How does he know he can trust the turtle, anyway? Do they have any evidence that it isn’t cut from the same cloth as Pennywise? It could have been leading Richie on. He could emerge from the sewers completely alone, with no route back to that otherworldly cavern.

Or maybe he won’t make it out of the sewers at all. Maybe he’ll wander down here until he dies, terrified until the end to look over his shoulder.

God. This is all probably what the turtle wants him to think. “Stupid fucking giant alien motherfuckers,” he mutters, trudging on. “You think you defeat the one and then you’ve gotta deal with the other. Eddie, if I get out of here I am never coming back to this town as long as I live.”

The thought warms him. Getting into his car, Eddie in the passenger seat, speeding out of Derry as fast as they can go. “We could go to Chicago,” Richie says, thinking out loud now. “My apartment is a mess, you’ll hate it. But it’s sunny. It’ll be so warm and sunny, there, Eds, we can lay in front of the windows for an entire day and not move. You’d hate that though, wouldn’t you. You’d want to wear sunscreen even though we were inside. Can you get sunburned through a window?”

No answer. Richie swallows and keeps talking. “It gets cold in the winter, though. It’s not like Maine cold. Winter here is so still. In Chicago you’ve got the lake hurling weather at you all the damn time. It’s a windy sort of cold and it never stops. We’ll have to get you a good coat. Although who am I kidding, you probably break out a parka the first week of October, don’t you. I bet you wear gloves and shit. I bet you have, like, winter hats. To protect your ears.” For most of his life he’s known Eddie in the summer; it’s where the bulk of their memories lie. Suddenly he wants to see Eddie bundled up for winter so badly he could cry. “We also don’t have to go to Chicago if you don’t want to. I’ll break my lease, I don’t give a fuck.”

Another fork in the tunnel. Richie goes left this time. He has no rationale for why; he just does. 

“Mike is planning a road trip around the country,” he says. “We could track him down. Or go see Bev and Ben—I don’t know how much you get to see when you’re dead, but they’re together now. Fully in love. It’s disgusting. I hope you’ve been haunting their asses just for the serotonin boost. Better than haunting me, I’m just…” He swallows. He doesn’t like to think of it: Eddie, silent witness to the slow downward spiral of the last several months. “You know. Jerking off and crying all hours of the day. Like usual.”

His foot slips on something under the water and Richie tumbles to his knees. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chants, keeping his eyes fixed forward. “Okay. We’re fine. It’s fine. Get it together, Tozier.”

He takes a moment to breathe before hauling himself back to his feet. His kneecaps ache and his mouth tastes disgusting; some of the water must have splashed into his face. 

God. There’s no way he’s making it out, is there.

“I’m sorry, Eds,” he says, trudging forwards. “I don’t know how to win this one. Never did so well on my own. I wish you would say something, man, just so I know. It would help. A lot.”

Silence. Richie lets out a shaky breath.

“I don’t know how much I trust all this, dude,” he says. He keeps expecting a monster to come leering out of the dark. For something evil to catch him unawares from behind: a horror instead of an Eddie. Once he has the thought, he can’t let it go. His whole being aches to turn around and check. “If my life flashes before my eyes right now, do you think I’ll get back some of the memories that are still missing? Maybe I got laid in high school and I just don’t know it, right? I thought I was a virgin when I started college. Was that even true? I could have been absolutely killing it in Derry High. Chowing down on carpet every lunch break.” Then he has to stop and wheeze out a couple of near-hysterical laughs. “Probably not, though. Just…probably not.”

There’s no way Eddie would be able to stay quiet after a joke like that. Richie just keeps moving. “I’m like a shark,” he says. “If they stop swimming forward they die. Richie shark, do-do-do-do-do-do…” He stops singing almost as soon as he starts. The sound of it reverberating through the dark tunnel is just too much.

He hates being alone. “I think the introvert/extrovert thing is bullshit, of course, but sometimes a bitch hasn’t seen another human face in like three days and it feels pretty bad, you know?” How long has he been walking through this tunnel? It feels like it’s been an eternity. Nothing but the dark and cold and wet for ages and ages. “Just like my sex life.” Jesus, this is going to be embarrassing if Eddie can actually hear him.

But Eddie can’t talk back. “This is actually my one chance to use all of your nicknames without you yelling at me! Oh, man, I’ve been cooking up some good ones, Eddie baby. Eds. Edsy. Ed, Edd, and Eddie. Edward Sullen—like that vampire twink, you know, but moodier? That’s you. Spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti. God damn I miss you. I’ve missed you my whole life and I didn’t fucking know it. And then I get you back and you’re gone again within a day, and _that’s_ homophobia, folks.” He swallows. It doesn’t matter. Eddie probably can’t hear him.

“I hate this,” he says. “This sucks massive clown balls. I’m gonna die alone down here and the turtle wouldn’t even let me see your face again. I wanted to. Scars and all. You’re all I ever wanna see, man.” 

Richie takes a moment to breathe. Might as well go for gold. “And I love you,” he adds, and then starts to laugh. “Love you enough that I went to hell to get you back. It splits me open. I need you around, Spaghetti man. We never have to talk about it again. Just live, please. That’s enough for me.”

Ahead of him, a light.

Richie actually freezes for a moment, disbelieving. Then he sloshes forward again, faster. “Please be the fucking end, of my god, just let me out of here, I’m losing my goddamn mind—”

The light gets bigger, brighter. He can see the vines growing down over the sewer entrance and the river beyond it, brown and sluggish this late in the summer. Every step brings him closer. “Here we go, Eddie,” he says, picking his way over the rocks at the entrance as fast as he dares.

He steps into the sun.

He can’t turn around yet. He knows the story. They both have to make it out. If he turns around now he could ruin everything.

He’s terrified. He stumbles forward a few more steps and then waits. Just waits. Squeezes his eyes shut so he won’t be tempted to look. “Just put me out of my misery,” he says. “Please.”

There’s a light touch on the back of his neck.

Richie is too petrified to move. If it’s a monster, he just hopes it makes quick work of him. The sunlight looks bloodred through his eyelids. The touch drifts to his shoulder, pushing him, turning him. His eyes open just as Eddie Kaspbrak places his hands on either side of Richie’s face.

“If you call me Spaghetti one more time I’ll fucking kill you,” Eddie says, and then yanks him down into a kiss so intense it almost pulls Richie off his damn feet.

“Oh holy shit,” Richie says, directly into Eddie’s sharp little mouth, and then he gets on with kissing back. He’s here, he’s _here,_ he’s alive under Richie’s hands and it almost doesn’t matter that they’re up to their ankles in water. Richie wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist and holds him as close as he can. Eddie buries his hands in Richie’s hair and pulls so hard it hurts, and it’s fucking perfect. 

They break apart to breathe with their foreheads pressed together. “Tell me you’re real,” Richie says. He can’t let go. “Tell me it worked.”

“It’s me,” Eddie says. “I promise.”

“I bet you say that to all the boys.”

“None of the other boys have ever brought me back from the dead.” Eddie’s voice is high and unbelieving. “For fuck’s sake, Richie, that turtle could have _killed_ you without a second thought—”

“Nah, he’s tame,” Richie says, which is maybe the biggest understatement of his life, but he’s stupid with the sweet reality of Eddie alive. “You couldn’t have said a single word in that fucking sewer? I was half-convinced you weren’t there, it was horrible.” He knows, even as he says it, that he’ll have nightmares about turning around in the dark for the rest of his life. “Way to leave me fucking hanging.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I couldn’t,” he says. “Part of the, I don’t fucking know, the magic. The myth. I just had to follow. You’re so brave, Rich.”

“I’m not. I’m really not.”

“You got us out.”

“I had to try.” Richie swallows and opens his eyes. Eddie’s face is still pressed so close to his. He doesn’t know what the kiss was supposed to mean—even he thinks it’s a stretch that just the pure joy of being alive could have driven Eddie to stick his tongue so far down Richie’s throat. But even after everything, Richie doesn’t feel brave enough to ask. “Are you okay?”

“I…think so?” Eddie opens his eyes as well, doe-eyed and intense as ever. “It feels weird to have a body again?” His voice goes up a lot at the end of the question, and Richie can tell that he’s walking the edge of a panic attack.

They should get away from this fucking sewer. “Come on,” Richie says. “Let’s find somewhere we can get cleaned up.”

“Please,” Eddie says, desperate. They untangle from each other. Richie gets a good look at him for the first time and feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.

The knife wound on Eddie’s cheek is now a vivid red scar, stark against his pale skin. He’s in the clothes he died in, complete with blood and holes, but his chest looks intact under the stained and tattered blue. As Richie watches, Eddie presses his palms to his stomach and takes a deep breath in. “Doesn’t hurt,” he says, noticing Richie’s stare. “But it’s like my body knows that it _should.”_

“You can’t walk down the street like that,” Richie finally manages to say. “Someone will call the cops.”

Eddie snorts. “Sorry, they didn’t let me take a carry-on to the afterlife. I don’t have another shirt, Richie.”

But Richie is already shrugging out of the button down he was wearing over his t-shirt. “Just take this.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose at it. “What is that pattern, little margheritas? Also, it looks filthy.”

“What, like everything you’re wearing isn’t?” He’s not wrong, though. Even if the gravedigger dirt was washed out by his time in Maturin’s cavern, it’s still soaked through and grimy from the sewer jaunt.

“Fine.” Eddie doesn’t take the shirt. Instead, he pulls his own clothes over his head in one jerky motion.

Richie sucks his breath in through his teeth. Eddie looks down at himself.

He has a scar over his very core, all bright scarlet and gnarled tissue. But it’s closed. Like something healed long ago. It almost looks like a flower. Eddie’s fingers drift over it, curious. Richie feels like he’s going to pass out.

“Please,” he chokes out. Eddie’s gaze snaps up, and when he sees the naked desperation in Richie’s face, he takes the offered shirt and puts his arms through it. His fingers seem clumsy on the buttons, but he works fast.

Someday, Richie will go to his knees and presses kisses to that starburst. For now, it just makes him remember the awful feeling of bright warm blood, not his own, spattering on his face. He can’t handle it. “Next time don’t turn your back to the fucking clown,” he says breathlessly.

Eddie grabs his shoulder. “There isn’t a next time,” he says. His voice is low and serious. “It’s done.”

It rings through Richie like a bell. He nods. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They stagger up through the trees. Richie needs to call the other Losers, but he doesn’t have the fucking breath for it. Especially not with Eddie staying so close, leaning on him every few steps for balance. His color is better but he still looks like he’s had the shit kicked out of him. Richie can’t imagine he looks much better.

Eddie reaches out to brush the leaves with his fingertips a few times. Like he needs reminding that the world is real.

They make it up to the road. “I should call the others,” Richie says, after taking a moment to catch his breath. “Let them know what’s up.”

Eddie nods. “Did any of them know you were coming?”

“No.”

“What the fuck?”

Richie doesn’t meet his eyes. “I was too afraid they would try to stop me.” He fishes his phone out from an inner pocket, fully expecting it to either be smashed to pieces or so waterlogged as to be entirely useless.

“I’m glad you came,” Eddie says quietly.

Richie closes his eyes. Takes one deep breath in, one deep breath out. “Me too,” he says.

Miraculously, the phone works. Richie dials the most recent number in his contacts: Bev.

She answers the phone already yelling.

_“RICHARD WENTWORTH TOZIER WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW WORRIED WE’VE BEEN—”_

“Woah, listen—”

_“—BEEN OUT OF OUR MINDS FOR A WEEK I SWEAR TO GOD WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU—”_

“A whole week?” He raises his eyebrows at Eddie, impressed.

Eddie isn’t looking at him. Eddie is regarding his own hands, like he’s surprised at their dexterity.

_“—TURN ON YOUR FUCKING LOCATION RIGHT THIS SECOND—”_

“Bevvy. Please calm down. I’m in Derry.”

The yelling abruptly stops. Then Bill’s voice chimes in to ask, “D-Derry?”

“Yeah, you know, the little murder town we grew up in. How are you, Bill? Didn’t realize you were there.”

“We’re all here,” comes Mike’s voice, and wow, they must be having a regular sleepover. Richie puts the phone on speaker, partially so everyone can be in the conversation, and partly because he’s scared of the slightly hollow way Eddie is staring at his own palms. “We were two seconds away from sending out a search party, Rich, Jesus. What are you doing in Derry?”

Eddie’s head snaps up at the sound of a familiar voice. He gives Richie a helpless sort of smile: how do they even begin to explain?

Richie takes on a tone of airy nonchalance. “I’m just out here with Eddie 2: Electric Boogaloo.” 

Eddie buries his face in his hands. “Jesus Christ.”

“2 Eddie 2 Kaspbrak?”

“What? _No.”_

“Star Eddie: The Kaspbrak Strikes Back.”

“Would you fucking stop?”

Incoherent noises are coming through the phone. “Richie, _what the fuck did you do?”_ Beverly demands.

“I got him back,” Richie says simply. “I wrote the sequel. He’s here with me.”

More incoherent noise. Bill’s voice cuts through the chaos. “Are you sure it’s him?” he snaps, sounding panicked. “It could be—you know it could be—"

“Would he be laughing at my jokes if he was the murder clown?” Richie asks, rolling his eyes. Eddie grabs the phone from him. 

“I’ve never laughed at one of your jokes a day in my life, you absolute hack, and _yes—”_ (this last is directed at the phone) “—it is me, I’m here. I’m not the fucking clown.”

Mike’s voice: “Prove it.”

“Fucking _how?”_

“Tell us something only Eddie would know,” Ben says, practical as ever. He has only the smallest of nervous tremors in his voice.

Eddie runs a hand through his hair so viciously it’s like he’s trying to pull it from his scalp. “Oh sure, sorry, let me do some fucking _soul-searching,”_ he snaps into the phone, “it’s not like I was recently _dead_ or anything, I can absolutely go pawing through whatever-the-fuck I remember from before I forgot it all and then remembered it and then _died_ and now have to remember it all _again.”_

“It sure sounds like him,” Bev says shakily. Eddie’s eyes are huge and spooked, like a horse about to bolt, and Richie doesn’t think before he grabs one of the flailing hands and holds it close to his chest.

“I’m pretty damn sure it’s him,” Richie says loudly. “If that, like, counts or whatever. Did we ever set up the electoral college for the Losers Club? I think my vote counts more than Bill’s.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m taller. And I have a bigger—”

Eddie kicks him in the ankle. “If you finish that sentence I’m going back in the sewer.” The more time he spends aboveground the more color there is in Eddie’s face. The scar is still a vivid red but the skin around it is flushed and rosy, undeniably alive. 

“You wouldn’t,” Richie says, and his voice comes out a little too raw.

They stare at each other. “I wouldn’t,” Eddie says. Their hands are still tangled together against Richie’s heartbeat. He swallows.

“Will one of you please fucking explain?” Beverly sounds like she’s on the verge of shouting again. 

Eddie looks so, so tired. They’re both disgusting with sweat and greywater. Richie feels like he could inhale an entire continental breakfast.

“I think we need to get cleaned up,” he says. “I wouldn’t even kiss Eddie’s mom with this mouth, and that’s saying something.” Eddie shrieks. A few tense laughs come over the phone. “Where are you all? I feel like we should do this in person.”

“We’re all in your apartment, dumbass,” Bev says. “Mike showed up and you weren’t here. No one knew where you’d gone.”

All the way in Chicago. Okay. Richie can handle that. It gives him and Eddie some time to get their stories straight. But he aches at the thought of the intervening hours before he can see his friends again. At his side, Eddie looks just as sad.

“I’m booking us flights to Portland,” Bill says. “Get cleaned up and get out of Derry. We’ll be there tonight.”

A smile blooms across Richie’s face. “That’s what I like to hear,” he says. “Shucks, Bill, you really know how to make a girl feel special.”

Eddie laughs a little, and the bright flash of his teeth and the soft red inside of his lower lip is enough to make Richie feel like a million bucks already.

“Eddie?” That’s Ben’s voice. He’s been mostly quiet. “Are you doing all right?”

Richie can see the breath catch in Eddie’s chest. He takes a moment to exhale. “Yeah, Ben,” he says. “I’m okay.”

Soft sounds of relief from the phone. Richie clears his throat so he won’t fall to his knees in the street and start sobbing. 

“Get here quick,” Eddie says into the phone. “If I don’t see you all soon I’m going to absolutely lose it.”

“We’re already on our way out the door,” Bev promises. “Eddie, we love you. Richie? Are you still there? We love you too.”

“Gosh, Ben, I’m sorry you had to find out about Beverly and me like this,” Richie says, and Eddie laughs helplessly into his shoulder. “We’ll see you all tonight.”

“Check in often,” Mike orders.

“Yes, dad.”

“We’ll talk soon. Stay safe.” Bill’s voice is the last they hear, and then the call ends. Richie and Eddie look at each other.

“We’ll see them tonight,” Richie says, because he needs the reassurance and he thinks Eddie does too. “I have a car. We can go.”

“I want a shower,” Eddie says. He’s swaying on his feet a little. “And, um, a nap? I guess I could sleep in the car though? I just—everything is so damn bright. I forgot how much light there is, being alive.”

Richie has a stone in his throat the size of a boulder. “We can get you some shades,” he says. “Some really douchey ones. Make you look like one of those motorcyclists who blasts his music really loud while he drives down the scenic routes, you know?” He tugs on Eddie’s arm, just a little, to get him to keep walking down the street. “Or a sexy little blindfold, if that’s what you’re into.”

The smile on Eddie’s face is so familiar, even though he looks ten types of exhausted. “Wouldn’t mind not having to see this shithole of a town anymore.”

“We can leave so soon,” Richie promises. “We can leave and never come back.” They make their way down the sunny road. Eddie leans into Richie’s shoulder and walks with his eyes half-closed.

The sun is high in the sky and warm on the top of Richie’s black hair. He can feel the heat of it settling into his bones, breaking through the terror that still grips so many of his muscles. It’s absurd to be alive with Eddie under his arm, but somehow he’s managed it. Fuck, he’s never going to be able to let Eddie out of his sight again.

“I can’t believe you saved me with the worst pun I’ve ever heard in my life,” Eddie says.

Richie trips over his feet. “You could hear me?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says softly. “I heard all of it.”

So he knows. He knows everything. 

Somehow, it makes Richie feel more peaceful than he has in three months. Nothing to hide behind anymore, Trashmouth. The only thing left to do is move forward. “Fuck you,” he says, because some things never change. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“Only because it was so _stupid.”_

“He seemed like he would enjoy some dad jokes.”

“He’s older than our literal universe—”

“Oh, no shit? Wild.”

“Fuck.” Eddie is shaking his head and laughing. It shakes him so bad that he staggers into Richie’s side; Richie wraps his arm around him more tightly without thinking. “Fuck, I can’t believe you performed your shitty stand-up for a literal elder god.”

“I think you’re secretly impressed. Come on. You can tell me. It was little badass.”

“Your hair looks stupid underwater,” Eddie huffs.

Richie tips his head back and laughs and laughs. He can’t get over the shock of him, the reality of him. His voice and his soft hair and his dark brown eyes. “Fuck, man, I missed you.”

At first Eddie doesn’t say anything. He tangles his fingers with Richie’s and squeezes hard for one moment before letting go. And that’s…that’s enough. For now, that’s enough.

They’ll have all the time in the world to talk about it. To figure everything out. Jesus, Eddie’s still got a wife—there’s a joke to be made about _‘til death do us part,_ but Richie’s not going to make it until he knows where Eddie stands.

“I missed you too,” Eddie says. He gives a long look to the approaching buildings of Derry, sun-warm and so familiar. “Get me out of here, Richie. Please.”

Fuck, Richie loves him.

“Right away, Spaghetti,” he says. And then he does.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr i am [kvothes](https://kvothes.tumblr.com/tagged/x) / my brand-new clown twitter is [@nonbinaryrichie](https://twitter.com/nonbinaryrichie)
> 
> there’s a sequel to this that wants writing, so keep an eye out. thanks for reading!


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